How To Record A Phone Call

Palmer — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:55:00 +0000

At Cogi, our mission is to capture the important parts of your conversations and meetings so you can review, share and search that content. It all starts with recording your calls and meetings and Cogi can help you do that.

Do you even know how to record a phone call? Many of us think of Watergate or government wiretapping when we hear the phrase ‘record a phone call.’ On the other hand, we are also more familiar with call recording due to increased use by large companies to track their customer service calls. When you call a customer service line for your bank, credit card company or any company you do business with, you often hear the phrase “this call may be recorded.” That is their way of taking care of their legal obligation. If you prefer not to be recorded, you can tell the customer service agent and they will either turn recording off or have you call a separate phone number that doesn’t automatically record all calls.

The fact is there are lots and lots of people recording phone calls today. In most states, you are legally required to notify the other party if and when you are recording a phone call. To read more about call recording laws, click here.

Have you ever finished an important phone call and then wondered exactly what was said? Unlike email, where our commitments are captured in text form, the content of our phone calls is gone immediately after the call has ended. And, often times we have very important phone calls and we are unable to take accurate notes. So what do we do? We have two choices: we can either call back and try to get clarification on the points we missed (which is embarrassing), or we can just muddle through and hope we get it right. Imagine the impact on your productivity if you always had that important information available to you? Now, there’s a new option: use Cogi to capture your important calls so you can listen to them again, or just read a transcript of the critical items and share that content with your colleagues. Click here to try Cogi call recording free for 30 days.

When you use Cogi to capture a phone call, the audio and transcript of that call are available in your ‘Cogi Portfolio’ on the Web. Once the call is completed, you can log in to your portfolio, listen to the audio, read a transcript of the points you marked, request a transcript of the entire call, or share the call and associated transcript with friends and colleagues.

Here’s a 90 second demo of how Cogi works.

In our next post, we’ll talk more about how Cogi works and about how you can use Cogi to capture not only phone calls, but also in-person meetings.

A Quick History of Cogi – Part 1

Palmer — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:44:00 +0000

Cogi was started in 2007 by Santa Barbara entrepreneurs, Bob Dolan, Mark Cromack and Palmer Jackson. Bob was the founding CEO of CallWave, a local Internet Telephony company that went public in 2004. Mark Cromack was a co-founder of another local telephony company, CrystalVoice, that was acquired by Global IP Solutions in 2007. Palmer was a seed investor and early employee at CallWave and had worked with Bob for years.We have to give credit to Bob for coming up with the original idea. What was that idea? Well, if you know Bob at all, you know that he’s constantly on the phone and even he would admit he’s got a bit of ADD (as do all 3 of us). Bob is one of those people who sees problems and wonders about how to fix them, while the rest of us just deal with those problems and wouldn’t even think of trying to solve them.So here’s the problem that Bob felt was not being addressed: how do you accurately capture the valuable content within our day to day conversations and meetings? We have become accustomed to having a searchable archive of our important email communications and our important documents, but we have no way of recovering the valuable, fleeting insights that often come up when we talk to eachother — either in person or on the phone. We try to take notes, but that can present two problems — first, our notes are often illegible, and second, we have to take our focus off of the conversation for a moment to write notes. With our backgrounds in telephony and Internet, we began to think of ways to solve this problem.

Early on we were fortunate to work with a couple of very talented marketing folks at Santa Barbara’s own Ideocore. Brett Posten and Robert TenEyck helped develop the name Cogi (a contraction of the phrase ‘Cogent Idea.’ ) Brett and Robert also helped us develop our ‘Core Idea.’ We decided that the Core Idea for Cogi is as follows: Cogi helps you capture your important conversations and meetings so you can review the content, search it, and share it with others.

Around that time there was a lot of buzz around Voicemail-to-text services such as PhoneTag and Grand Central — even CallWave had developed a so-called ‘gist’ service that would send you a text message of your voicemail message. However, we used to joke that voicemail was so 1990s and, after all, THAT’S THE CALL YOU MISSED!

What if you could have a written transcript of a critical conversation you had with a client, your boss, a prospective customer, your lawyer, your doctor? Wouldn’t that be a lot more valuable than a transcript of a voice-mail message (Hey, Bob, call me back)? YES!

So, Cogi was born. Two years later, we have a real service that does exactly what we talked about some two and a half years ago and we have customers using the service every day.

In my next post, I will detail the features of Cogi and talk about the process of how we developed them. Of course, you can always get a free 30 day trial of Cogi by visiting our site. Probably the easiest way to understand how our service works is to watch our demo here.

The Official Cogi Blog » Palmer

How To Record A Phone Call

A Quick History of Cogi – Part 1